I’m in WORLD this morning! Hie thee hence to check it out but here’s a snippet:
In his 1997 book, Women and the Common Life: Love, Marriage, and Feminism, Christopher Lasch observed the irony of the destruction of female agency and competency by feminism. “In allying themselves with the helping professions,” he wrote, “women improved their position in the family only to fall into a new kind of dependence, the dependence of the consumer on the market and on the providers of expert services, not only for the satisfaction of their needs but for the very definition of their needs.” The incursion of experts into the trust and imagination of women eroded intuitive wisdom and practical knowledge. With the dawning era of social media, many women have turned from the trusted expert to the popular influencer, the person who produces culturally resonant “lifestyle” content as if presenting self-evident truths.
Like early Christian heretics who simplified complicated and troubling mysteries by creating dichotomies where there were none, forcing binary choices when a little nuance would have gone a long way, the modern influencer untangles feminine troubles with logic that seems, at a glance, unassailable—until you peruse the comment section.
Millennial and Generation Z women, it seems to me, are particularly prone to fall into the trap of rearranging their lives under the influence of online accounts. Lacking an integrated and embodied community, aching for mothers and grandmothers who in past generations imparted lore and conferred status, too many succumbed to the broken promises of feminism. They are left sifting through the ash, trying to figure out how to find a man and then, if it’s not too late, to nurse a baby and get dinner on the table all at the same time.
And have a lovely day!
I am acquainted with a young woman who, flummoxed at choosing a name for her second baby, paid an Instagram "baby name consultant" $2,000 to weigh in.
How anyone just one generation behind me could do something almost literally incomprehensible to me on about 4 different planes is a mystery I find myself pondering often.
Also, I feel sad. I imagine she produced a whole dossier of information about herself and the baby's father and their interests and hobbies and background to this "consultant" and in that I see a deep loneliness and isolation. A very short time ago we all had friends and family who knew all those things about us and without even realizing it applied that information to advise on our baby names; it was part of the ritual and celebration of pregnancy. Now here we have someone handsomely paying a stranger on the dopamine dispenser, whom the algorithm placed in front of her and pretended is important and trustworthy, for advice on such an intimate and personal and joyous matter. It's heartbreaking, really.
If I understand the 'algebra' undergirding your World article correctly, I agree that your sacramental approach, to paraphrase, "sweeping one's floor, looking into the face of one's spouse, conversing with one's child" as necessary components to a well-lived life, is wiser and more joy-filled than the abstracted 'spiritual' advice of virtual experts and influencers. The sacramental approach draws on cultural wisdom accumulated over centuries and adjusts and applies it to the specifics of one's circumstances, rather than deploying the foolishness of untried (or worse, tried and failed) philosophies undergirding much of the 'wisdom' on offer today.